Private jets have a free-rider problem

If you try to take a free ride on, say, public transit in New York City, you’ll get in trouble with the law. If your mode of transportation is a private jet, on the other hand, there’s a high risk you’ll be offered champagne.

Private jets are far from free, of course; the average hourly charter rate for a midsize jet is $12,730, according to an index maintained by the charter company Jettly. But relative to their impact on the climate and the millions of the rest of us who fly commercial, private jets don’t cost nearly enough.

You could call private jets an example of what economists call a free-rider problem: They crowd and pollute the airspace and environment that belongs to everyone without paying an appropriate cost. They also offer a clue as to why controlling global heating is such a challenge.

A mere 256,000 people, or the top 0.003% of the global population, use private jets, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a nonprofit research and advocacy group. About half of their flights are for leisure travel, including delivering their kids to summer camps, the report notes. Each of those flyers produces between 10 and 14 times more greenhouse gas than the typical commercial passenger, the report estimates.

So, for example, a private jet from Teterboro, New Jersey, just outside of New York, to Dulles International in Washington produces 538.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per passenger, compared with 44.38 kg of CO2 for each of the poor souls on a Delta Air Lines Inc. flight from LaGuardia Airport to Reagan National. 

Private-aviation backers will point out that many more people are packed into our hypothetical Delta flight than on that Gulfstream. The wide gap in passenger volumes explains why, at about 20 million tons of CO2 per year, private jets make up just 2% of all aviation emissions. And those make up maybe 3% of total global emissions. If private jets were outlawed tomorrow, you might save the equivalent of, say, Tanzania’s annual carbon pollution. 

But the problem is growing. Private air travel hit a record of nearly 3.9 million flights last year, up 34% from 2019, according to data provider WingX. Jet sales have jumped 24% since 2021 to $40.3 billion in 2025, according to data from the jet-financing firm Global Jet Capital. Order backlogs at big manufacturers such as Gulfstream and Bombardier Inc. were up 20% in the second quarter of 2026 from a year earlier, to $66.8 billion. The bulk of these jets, 69% of the world’s total, end up in the US, according to the IPS report. 

More important, the private-jet problem speaks to a broader, more consequential issue in the fight to avoid the worst effects of global heating: a vast and growing inequality that worsens climate change’s effects and makes addressing it much harder.

The world’s wealthiest people and nations generate the most greenhouse gases, while the poorest barely generate any. Each of the 73 million people living in Tanzania is responsible for about a quarter ton of CO2 per year, on average. One executive in a private jet has already spewed that much by the time she’s halfway from Teterboro to Dulles. 

Yet poorer nations are suffering far more than richer ones from the consequences of the 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) that the planet has already warmed above preindustrial averages. Tanzania, while only the world’s 91st-worst carbon polluter, according to the 2025 Global Carbon Budget, was the 47th most vulnerable nation to climate change and 150th in its ability to cope. The East African nation is already experiencing the extreme floods and droughts a hotter planet brings, effects that will intensify with every extra tenth of a degree of heating.

And even if rich nations miraculously erased their emissions overnight, poor ones would still suffer for decades afterward, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Melbourne published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

But the unfairness hits even closer to home than that. US commercial airline passengers pay all kinds of extra charges for the privilege of being crammed into routinely delayed tubes. Along with fees for checked bags, carry-ons and decent seats, they also pay a 7.5% transportation tax and random line items with cryptic names like “passenger facility charge” and “flight segment tax.” Private-jet passengers pay only a federal jet-fuel tax of 21.9 cents a gallon, the IPS report notes.  

It’s little wonder, then, that private jets account for 16% of the Federal Aviation Administration’s operations but contribute just 0.6% of the taxes that fund it, the IPS report notes. Does that mean we should raise private jet taxes 25-fold to make up the difference? Why, yes, in fact. The median wealth of a private-jet owner is $190 million, according to the report. Jets are luxury goods used by a wealthy few that spoil the environment and bring economic damage to the rest of us. They should be priced as such.

Instead, we subsidize these things and not just in the FAA budget. President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act turned a temporary ability to speed up depreciation for private jets into a forever perk. That means owners can write down the full amount of their planes in the first year. Florida, the busiest state in the country for private jets with 12% of US flights, levies neither fuel nor sales taxes on them.

And now, making the concept of a free ride even more literal and obnoxious, the House version of the ALERT act, meant to improve air safety after the deadly collision of a commercial jet and military helicopter over the Potomac River, includes several more giveaways to private-jet travelers. 

Stripping away these unnecessary perks, ostensibly meant to help businesses but instead mostly making luxury travel cheaper, would be a good start. Imposing a luxury tax should be the next step. Governments could raise $3 billion a year with just a 10% tax on used jets and a 5% tax on new ones, the IPS report suggests. That’s not much, but every bit helps when you’re trying to keep planes from crashing into one another and the planet from overheating. 

Economists consider free riders a market failure. But our world is full of them, including the fossil-fuel companies, which get $7 trillion a year in explicit and implicit government subsidies while also being the primary source of the greenhouse-gas emissions cooking the planet - after lying to the public for decades about their products’ effects. Until we turn this perverse math on its head, progress will be elusive. Private jets could be a good start.   

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal.